Our mods are doing a wonderful job keeping this place up and running while adding new and improved features on a fairly frequent basis. But from time to time, we'll get raided by shills out to use their skills of deception and propaganda to make us look bad and justify their BS talking points.

Shills come in many different forms--"lone wolf" dissenters that migrate here from reddit in hopes of putting together some shoddy, selectively cropped and edited screenshot to turn in to the commissar for fake internet points--or even paid shills that are hired by various PACs (ShariaBlue comes to mind) to concern troll and try shifting the narrative by using targeted talking points.

Most of the time, shills are really easy to spot. You'll see a post with an innocent enough title in new, go to expand out to see the content, and you'll find one of two things: racial epithets or "muh jewish conspiracy". Sure, some of us might upvote that by mistake by going through and blindly upvoting posts. TBH, I've probably done it once or twice purely on accident. As good-natured as your intentions may be, we must keep an eye out to make sure they don't get screenshots of us throwing tacit approval behind an ideology we don't support or condone in the slightest bit. They're desperate and will try anything in their power to use us in an attempt to discredit a duly elected President.

However, shills are working together and becoming more adaptive in their approach. In this light, here are a few tips that you can use to protect TDW:

1. When in doubt, deport. Mods can't be everywhere at every single instance. It's up to us to sound the alarm, even if it means triggering a false positive every once in a while. Even though I'm not a mod and can't speak on their behalf, i would think that reporting a post with the sincere belief that it's against TDW rules when it's not is better than letting a shill slip through the cracks.

2. Check post history While this isn't entirely definitive, a fresh account or a blank post history is oftentimes indicative of a shill. Not a total giveaway, but a definite red flag nonetheless.

3. Check links and sources If you've been on T_D or TDW enough, you are pretty familiar with the typical sources that are used such as magaimg.net , Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, etc... Typically, a shill post will contain a link from an uncommon or out-of-place source that we oftentimes don't cite. The more obvious shills will use a link that has "stormer" in the title.

4. Be on the look out for concern trolling. What is concern trolling? "the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion." This comes in many different forms and there are too many examples to list here. While this isn't explicitly against the rules here on TDW, these false narratives should be shut down and downvoted.

5. For the sake of evidence, don't forget to take screenshots of the entire post--comments and all. When it comes out in some news story on Salon or Mother Jones that "TDW is racist and here's why", we can instantly disprove it with full screenshots of the shilling attempt. Revealing their methods and strategies is a big red pill, even if the veil slips for only a brief moment.

I'm not saying all of this to make people paranoid, ruin the fun, or scare people out of upvoting. We shouldn't have to fear being a pro-MAGA platform that is a constant 24/7 Trump rally, but we must be aware of the forces that are out to destroy us and act accordingly.